Operation management of virtual enterprises

The paper presents a study on the operation management of virtual enterprises. A virtual enterprise is a temporary alliance of member enterprises formed to exploit fast-changing opportunities. During the operation of a virtual enterprise, its constituent member enterprises, which are geographically distributed and organizationally independent, collaborate with each other to execute the whole business process of the virtual enterprise. Therefore, how to support the business process oriented virtual enterprise cooperative operation is the focus of our study on the operation management of virtual enterprises. In order to achieve this, we propose a scheme that consists of three parts: the modeling of the distributed business process in virtual enterprises, the modeling of virtual enterprises themselves, and the control of the business process execution in virtual enterprises based on the two kinds of models established in the former two parts.